There are cliffs inside me.
Every day I run to the edge
and hurl myself into the sea.
I love the fall, the salt.
“You shame us,” they said.
“Poems are nonsense,” they said.
“How badly,” they said,
“you’ve been brought up.”
But I am the one who makes baskets
of nettles. And I am the one
found by the lyre. I am the one
who walks rooftops in moonlight.
Let others wear a corset,
a bodice, two skirts and a cap to the beach
where they do nothing more than tiptoe on the shore,
I am the one who runs naked
beneath my thin dress to swim
in the Black Sea for hours.
And I am the blood of Ghengis Khan.
I am Russian to the core.
I am birch and green parks and pines,
and Russia’s endless steppes,
and I am the Russian people themselves
who ask questions of life and death.
They call me a decadent Madonna.
They call me half nun, half whore.
Yes. I was born to be an unmasker.
I was born not to be servant, but master.
But this is the hour before the dawn.
Can you smell it? Blood in the street.
The shadow of the future is thrown
long before it arrives. And in all of Russia,
there is nowhere to hide.